As a result of interviews with 55 University departments, it was determined that the top administrative data access and manipulation issues across the University are:
Issues were grouped by applications, and it was found that the top administrative data access and manipulation issues across the University are Financial Reporting and Budgeting and Planning. As a result, the Discovery Phase Project Team presented the following recommendations to the Data Governance Steering Committee:
Benefit opportunities for Financial Reporting include promoting efficiency by reducing costly personnel hours by moving from the gathering, matching, and consolidating data (all of which entail a considerable manual effort) towards data analysis. The ability to directly access quality, nonvolatile information that has common definitions will result in more efficient decision-making.
The project promotes a standard budgeting tool that will serve the needs of the Schools and CFU, where the tools currently used are disparate or nonexistent. This will provide the necessary data, tools, and infrastructure to formulate budgets, models, what-if scenarios, and projections in the manner required to manage operations with less manual intervention.
The overall project will be overseen by a Data Governance Steering Committee, with representation from the University’s Central Fiscal Unit, Information Systems, the Danforth Campus Schools, and the School of Medicine. Two project teams will be formed, which will be overseen by the overall Project Manager, and Project Leaders dedicated full-time for each project.
The Project Leaders for each project will consist of an Information Systems resource and a Financial resource. The two projects are: 1) Budgeting and Planning, and 2) Financial Reporting. Each project team will be further defined into working groups with team leaders. Team leaders will be dedicated at least half-time to the projects. Workgroups will be formed with representatives from each of the above organizational units, who will be dedicated to the project four to six hours a week. They will be supplemented with assistance from internal personnel.